Your Concept Of Who You Are Is F*cking You Up | Mark Manson on Impact Theory

ultimately your concept of yourself is built out of the narratives that we create out of our experience so all of the experiences that i've had or all the experiences that you have your idea of tom is just this vast collection of narratives that you've constructed around your own experiences and it's layer on top of layer on top of layer on top of layer and your feeling brain has a certain valence for those experiences and so if you want to change how you feel about yourself you have to start peeling back those layers of narrative and start getting down into the deepest earliest ones because those are often the most impactful and influential well you can't leave us with just that so how do we begin peeling back those layers man [Music] hey everybody welcome to impact theory today's guest is the new york times best-selling author of the international smash hit the subtle art of not giving a [ __ ] his book which many considered to be the generation defining self-help book sold millions of copies was translated into 25 languages and absolutely dominated the bestseller list for a staggering amount of time it's also been at or near the top of amazon's most read list continuously since the chart began and it remains one of the most downloaded audio books of all time on audible he's also written for or been cited by some of the most prestigious outlets on the planet including time cnn bbc news business insider yahoo news the huffington post and many many more additionally he's published hundreds of blog articles which are viewed by millions of people every month making him one of the most visible and studied authors of our time so please help me in welcoming the founder and ceo of infinity squared media the author of the recent book everything is [ __ ] a book about hope mark manson welcome to the show that's a that's a nice intro i should uh should have you do my my pr i'd be happy to do it man look the stats are staggering so putting something like that together is pretty easy yeah it's i'm sure that kind of thing really took you by surprise but what you've done with it in terms of really um giving some self-help that is very direct and just sort of says it like it is in a voice that i think people can relate to is is really amazing and i'm super excited to have you here and thanks go into some of these topics yeah it's good to be here especially the new book which i think is lovely everything is [ __ ] that's a nice title certainly uh catches your attention the thing that i found most interesting is the talk about values and like how much values begin to inform your identity and basically your values are essentially who you are yes take us into that what does it mean and then how much malleability is there in values sure so my focus in my work has always been value focused i feel like in the self-help and self-development world there's so much focus on success you know getting ahead in your career starting a business making more money having better relationships but nobody's actually standing back and defining what success is like is our definition of success valuable or not um and i think especially in today's you know crazy internet world where we're exposed to everything um deciding what we're choosing to define as success is is a more important question than ever before um so that's kind of what got me started on the whole value question in general and then when i started investigating it and doing a lot of research and writing about it i started to discover that like basically you know if you think of like how how you define a person in general um as humans we tend to define people by their choices by their actions um but then what motivates their actions well often it's how they feel and what what motivates how they feel about certain things and it's their perception of what's valuable and what's not and so that's kind of how i drilled down to to this idea that essentially what we are is just an aggregation of what we choose the value in this world if i value money more than anything else that will come to define me through my actions my behaviors what i invest my time and attention into if i value family that will define who i am because everything else will flow from that yeah the thing i find interesting about values is people often act as if they are empirical truths like money is valuable or family is valuable and they don't realize that it was a choice often handed to them by the way they grew up their parents with their parents instilled in them and so stepping back and recognizing that all of this is a choice that you can consciously decide what you're going to value and i'd love to hear your thoughts on how the process works of deciding to value something so if somebody finds themselves in a place where they feel totally [ __ ] up they don't like who they are and they buy into this notion that okay a lot of this is being driven by values how do they actually change that yeah it's funny because i'm not a huge fan of a lot of like kind of the typical self-help tropes but the answer to this question i think is kind of classic visualization but it's not the visualization that we usually hear about so what i talk about in the book is that you like let's say let's say i'm just really superficial and i value money more than anything like i've got like a fleet of yachts and it's it's all i care about you know um and then something happens in my life and i realize that that's pretty superficial i should like grow up a bit and you know value something else and it's not as simple as just deciding like we've all had that experience in our lives where we wish we cared about something that we don't or vice versa we wish we didn't care about something that we do and you can't just stop um and so the the process that i described in the book is that essentially before you can commit to a new value you kind of have to like try them on like like it's like going to a store and trying on a bunch of pairs of clothes um and the way you try on a new value is you need to sit down and visualize and you can even write it out if you want but it's like let's say all i care about is my fleet of boats and uh and i want to try on a new value um like charity or something i have to sit down and start asking myself what would it mean for my life what would it mean for me as a person if i didn't value those boats anymore and that's a very hard question it really it messes us up because we realized that a lot of our relationships would probably fall apart a lot of our business commitments would probably fall apart a lot of our understanding of ourselves would be shaken up or or questioned and it's a very difficult thing to ask um and so you know most of the times when you see visualization taught in the self-help industry it's like they take a guy who wants a fleet of boats and they say visualize a fleet of boats now go get it and it's like no no what you need to do is take a guy who wants a fleet of boats and say visualize not wanting a fleet of boats what would that say about you who would you be if that thing you always desired was not your desire anymore yeah that to me is really interesting and you went through a pretty cool moment like that where you said ultimately this all comes down to choices and for a long time in your life you just always assumed you were going to be a musician that was like where you were headed and then choosing to do the writing instead and the the thing that really interested me in that was you said there was a period of mourning yeah why is there a period of mourning you know what's going on as we reshape ourselves so my background is is a little bit buddhist and i subscribe to the belief of no self essentially that that our conception of who we are is just kind of this arbitrary imagined thing in our brain and so i think of our relationship with ourselves as being basically functioning the same way as like our relationship with another human being so when something when you lose a part of yourself so i spent pretty much all my my early life wanting to be a musician that was my ambition it was my hobby my passion it's how i spent all my time and i went to music school and i just got the [ __ ] kicked out of me and i was like oh this is not gonna work anymore and the process of letting go of that value was was very much similar to like a breakup like it felt like losing a girlfriend or losing a friendship like this thing that gave all this meaning and emotion to my life was now unavailable to me and whenever you you lose something like that you go through the same emotional process which is that a prop that process of grieving or mourning because the same way you know a breakup leaves you grieving this beautiful thing in your life that no longer exists when you lose an important value or an important part of yourself you also grieve this beautiful thing that defines your life and no longer defines it yeah that i think is um it's such a critical thing to understand how your identity begins to get tied up in all of this and i think a lot of this hinges on what you talked about right off the top which is how we define success yeah so how do you help people in that so that they don't succumb to a trap um i know you're the example that you gave in in one of your articles i thought was so hilarious which is the being driven being ambitious towards something without taking a moment to reflect on the morality of what you've decided to value and you said take hitler who's one of the most driven people and has had this tremendous impact um but was a psychopath yeah so walk us through like you you go pretty into like how we can sort of reason our way to really having a base understanding of heard you talk about kant and like morality at like a really deep level yeah so how do we begin to to get to a base level of like okay now i'm going to stack my belief system my values on top of this base sure um just a little background on the hitler thing for our viewers you think you need to clarify i don't understand no i've i've wanted for so long i've wanted i i had this idea with a friend we got drunk and went paintballing and and i as you do yeah where most my ideas come from and uh and i was talking to him i was like you know what'd be amazing if if you did like uh if you did like a tim ferris style podcast with like a fake hitler and you're like so adolf what's your morning routine you know like how do you rally the troops how do you inspire millions of people and it would just be this beautiful satire of kind of like like focusing on that point of like if so if you're not improving yourself for the right reasons you could be damaging yourself you know the why behind everything everything you try to improve or everything that you're driven towards is is more important than actually you know how far you get so for me it's it's i i see a very direct connection between self-improvement and ethics i think if you if you dig deep enough into these questions of of what growth means or what improvement means you inevitably run into what is better period what is better or worse period what makes a better life what makes humanity better um and so it's my goal has always been i never want to be that guy on stage who's like this is what you should do this is how you do it here's my five step method blah blah blah you know i i want to be the guy who who doesn't i don't want to give answers i want to give better questions i want to help people sort through these questions in themselves because ultimately the these questions around values are so personal there's there's no way for me to answer any individual without inserting my values onto them and when you do that you rob them of the ability to choose what matters for themselves choose their own meaning in their life um so for me it's just it's all about just pointing people in the right direction pointing out you know little hypocrisy or little like kind of paradoxes and and trying to steer them towards um finding their own answers so give me some of those better questions and what should we be asking ourselves um well you know the the classic thing is always like you know write down a list of goals or whatever i i would go past that i'd say you know write down your goals and then ask yourself why do i want each of these goals what would it mean in my life if i accomplish these goals um similarly you know a common exercise is like write down things you're grateful for um ask yourself why are you grateful for them what would happen to your life if you didn't have them i mean that that's the crazy thing is that a lot of a lot of times the things we're most grateful for are actually the things that we're all [ __ ] up about you know it's like it's if you had asked me uh uh when i was um you know in one like i i had a series of very dysfunctional relationships i was happy as a pig and [ __ ] in the middle of those you know i would be like oh my girlfriend is the most most beautiful thing and you know and it's like no dude like you're i was a mess um and so we it's not just about questioning uh you know the bad things in our life you know like why did this painful thing happen you need to question the good things as well like why why does this feel good is it does it feel good for a good reason because there are a lot of things that feel good that are actually hurting you yeah that's one of the things that i really want to dive into is so how do we begin to establish what we think is good what does it mean to be better um and you come to this from an ethical place and i know that you don't want to like direct people too much and say believe this or whatever but what are some jumping off points like is it to go read philosophy you said that you approach life as a buddhist like yeah how can people begin to build that framework for themselves because what what i'm really trying to get to is i feel like you have to have a base belief of some kind upon which things stack but i don't think people think about that yes and even just pointing them in a direction of of how to start begin defining that for themselves i think would be super helpful yeah so for me i found that i talk about kant in the book i was very inspired by kant's moral philosophy basically he has this principle called the formula of humanity which is essentially it's so simple but it kind of explains everything he says that always act in such a way that you never merely treat people a person as a means but always as an end um and what that means is like don't use people you know like anything you do uh the whole point of what you do what you do like the end goal of what you do should always be a person whether it's yourself or somebody else so like if you're like kind of misleading somebody or just saying something to somebody just to get them to like i don't know give you some money or you know make them like you a little bit um you know under that principle like that's that is not growth that is not success um any basic stuff like lying cheating stealing like all of those are examples of using people as a means to some other end rather than treating the person as an end in the of themselves um so i i when i came across that principle it just for me it kind of blew me back on just how universal and powerful and useful it was um because in and you know i spent a lot of time writing about dating and relationships and and i i was coming from a place where i you know my philosophy around relationships was always like the thing that screws relationships up is treating people as a means is being transactional in your relationships um and so when i found that con stuff i was like damn this dude gets it yeah it it is very interesting and if you had to um and look you've urged people not to take you too seriously and so i asked this question knowing that but like um if you had to define success in a sentence sure um how would you define it i for me success means um creating a life and creating a world with better problems that's interesting that reminds me of uh quote of yours i'm going to paraphrase but um if you want purpose in your life the most important thing you need to do is answer honestly the following question what is your favorite flavor of [ __ ] sandwich which i thought was absolutely phenomenal that is the absolute right question but what do you mean by that uh it's basically anything you pursue like our mind plays this little trick on us which is uh when we want something our our our brain only shows us the good side of it it doesn't show the sacri the sacrifice required for it um and everything every experience you have in life there is a [ __ ] sandwich part of it you know there's there's everything has its associated problems um but our brain doesn't think about that when we're pursuing it and so uh for me like one of the most powerful heuristics is to simply instead of thinking about what benefits i want uh in my life i try to think about what problems do i want in my life um you know it's something as simple as like you know people might see this show and they're like oh damn i wish i had a badass show like that on youtube you know it's like they don't understand like there's a whole crew here there's logistics there's like waivers you gotta get like clear through lawyers and all sorts of crap and it's like those are the problems you chose you know those are the problems that you wanted to have and that's why it's a successful show it's not just because it's like oh damn having a show would be awesome you know like it's easy to just want something so yeah your whole concept around struggle i think is really powerful you talk really interestingly about emotions in the book you go into the um newton's uh emotional laws that were really interesting why is it so important especially as it relates to willpower to understand your emotions to leverage them um but at the same time when you talk about emotions there's an inherent sense of like don't always trust your emotions sure so untangle this emotional knot for us emotions are are messy for a lot of reasons but but one of the the key things that i talk about is i use i use this analogy of a car if your consciousness is a car you have two brains in it you have a feeling brain and a thinking brain and most people's assumption is that the thinking brain is the responsible one driving and the feeling brain is like the bratty little kid in the passenger seat screaming and pointing at stuff out the window and it's like it's the job of your thinking brain to like keep two hands on the wheel and be like shut up shut up trying to drive here you know and it's as a culture we look at anybody who fails to control their impulses or their emotions as somebody as somebody who's just fundamentally failing to drive their own car we see it as a failure of willpower and discipline but the truth is if you if you dig into all the psychological literature it's the feeling brain is actually driving the car and he's a little bit crazy he's like i i compare him to like an angry boyfriend who refuses to stop for directions like he just wants to go wherever he wants to go and he's not going to listen to anything and the thinking brain is actually in the passenger seat like our conscious mind is a passenger in our own behavior who has deluded himself into thinking that he's driving even though he's not and what i talk about is that the power of the thinking brain is that we get to draw the map the thinking brain gets to decide what what the lay of the land is so even though we don't totally have control over uh what's pushing us forward our actions our emotions all those things we do have control over the meaning and the interpretation of those actions and emotions and so what i talk about is that to develop a real sense of control in your life to feel that feel a sense of self-discipline it's not about beating your emotions in the into submission because that that just causes greater neuroticism and compulsion the trick is is that you got to get the two brains to talk to each other um and and it's hard because they speak different languages you know so it's instead of like just trying to get your feeling brain to shut up you need to ask your feeling brain well how does this make you feel you know it's like oh how how does waking up at 5 a.m and going to the gym feel the feeling brains be like oh that feels awful like why would you ever do that and and then the thinking brain needs to be like okay okay that's okay you know i hear you um but why does it feel bad you know what about 6 a.m feeling brain's like well that's not as bad you know and it would feel nice to work out i guess you know and so you it becomes this like negotiation between the two sides of yourself and um and there are a lot of like kind of mental tricks to coax to like kind of work with your emotions to leverage your emotions and get get the feeling brain pointed in the direction you want it rather than just fighting it for your entire life yeah i love that i want to go farther on that so um going back to the [ __ ] sandwich the whole idea of like what are the things you actually want to struggle with yeah um how do we like think of willpower in terms of aligning with the things that are hard that you enjoy and i think that your own example of i thought i wanted to be a musician but writing was the thing that made me lose track of time like i feel like that does a great job of addressing this yeah i think there are things in our lives where we don't even i think the things that we tend to be passionate about we don't even realize we're passionate about them because they seem so normal and obvious to us so for instance to use to use the music and the writing example i remember when i was in in music school i was practicing i played guitar so i was practicing like six hours a day just beating my head against the wall trying to learn all these different songs and stuff and i just i hated it it was a grind and it felt like a job i was supposed to do and i remember actually right before i quit i uh there was a there was a kid in the program who was like you know he was an all-star like he everybody knew he was gonna make it you know um and it's funny today i think he has two or three grammys but um so like i found him in the cafeteria and i sat down with him and i'm like oh man like i don't know like how do you can you give me some advice man he's like yeah sure what's going on i'm like how do you practice this much like i'm practicing like six hours a day you know how much are you practicing he's like yeah six hours a day and i'm like but yeah but how do you like stay motivated how do you like what's your warm-up like you know like how do you how do you schedule your practice time and he's just looking at me like i'm speaking klingon like he's he's like what are you talking about like i just practice like i always practice like whoa it didn't even compute for him and then i was like okay i i should probably quit um [Laughter] so jump ahead like five six years i started blogging and i would go to these like internet marketing conferences and stuff and people would start coming up to me and they're like oh man i love your blog man like your articles they're they're like 10 20 pages long you're posting like multiple each week and i'm like yeah thanks they're like man it's incredible so uh you know what's your writing regimen like like how do you get yourself motivated you know it starts asking me all these questions and i'm like looking at him like what are you talking about like i just write you know i just sit down and write you know i don't even have to think about it and uh and it kind of like rung a bell in my head of like wait a second like that's that's that's something that's like that's a signal that there's something special about this because for whatever reason what seems to cause other people a lot of stress and pain comes easily to me and what causes me a lot of stress and pain you know came easily to to the guy who did make it through music school um and so i realized that it's it's not about like grit or willpower or just like wanting it enough it it's a lot of it too it's just we're all masochists a little bit you know like we all there's some pain in the world that we all it gets us off a little bit and i found mine and uh and so yeah i just you just you just keep hitting that [ __ ] like you just keep going and um i think people when they're when you're so focused on pleasure and and pleasant rewards you don't actually get to that question you don't actually get to like yeah what's what's that pain that like actually kind of gets me going you know and because we all have it and that that's that's the sweet spot when you can find it yeah that's really interesting i love how much you um sort of orbit around emotions and how people can really get in connection with what using my own language would be sort of the neurochemical reality of what you're doing walk us through the the three newton's three laws of emotions i found these to be really really interesting speaking of gravitational pull i've always found newton's life super fascinating because not only was he like one of the smartest guys ever but when you read about his life like he was a total head case like had a very traumatic childhood suffered a lot of abuse and just was very anti-social and emotionally dysfunctional his entire life um and so i thought it would be really cool to kind of use him and his life as an example to demonstrate a lot of these topics that we're talking about you know in terms of uh identity growth self-discipline etc and so i took his three laws of motion and i basically just created emotional analogs of those so the first one was uh um for every action there's an equal and opposite emotional reaction and this is basically just the idea that every emotion is simply a response to either pain or the absence of pain so when you remove pain from life a positive emotion emerges in reaction and if you add pain into life a negative emotion uh emerges um the second one so the second one if i remember right was our self-worth equals the sum of our emotions over time so you could even you might even say like identity equals our emotions over time so basically let's say something traumatic happens in your childhood um that that pain early on in your life causes a lot of negative emotions and one of the things that i talk about is that anytime we feel an emotion it compels us to to do what i call equalizing which is um like if i'm angry at you i'm gonna continue to be angry at you until i either get you know retaliate or you apologize like something needs to happen to make that anger go away there needs to be some sort of like equalization between us and if there is no equalization that anger just kind of simmers and sits there uh forever and one of the reasons why childhood traumas are so debilitating for people is that essentially these extremely painful experiences occur to our feeling brains while our thinking brains are still undeveloped and don't know how to explain or create meaning around that pain so let's say something really painful happened to me now i'd be like oh well you know he meant well and you know [ __ ] happens or whatever but if i'm like a five-year-old my explanation for it only gets as far as like i'm a bad i'm a bad boy i'm a bad person and the world hates me you know like that's and that will stick um because it doesn't get equalized and i'll stick for the rest of my life and the problem is is that we forget that that painful thing happens so we just kind of go through life with this feeling of inferiority and pain that lingers that we can't really put an explanation to or explain away and so the process of therapy is basically unraveling a lot of our experiences until we get back to that original experience and with our adult thinking brain we can now put meaning to that pain that is helpful to us essentially so that's the second law is that our identity is is the sum of our emotions over time um and then the third law is uh our identity will continue to be our identity until new experience acts against us so to use the music school example um i was a musician i would introduce myself as a musician and then i got to second semester music school and um and had my ass handed to me and suddenly i'm like oh [ __ ] i'm not a musician anymore you know and now i have to go around and it's like i'm not a musician i don't know what i am but it required there was some new contrary experience that was required to create that shift within me and and this is why identity change by definition needs to be painful and uncomfortable because if it's not painful or uncomfortable uh nothing's changing nothing's shifting there might be a perception of a change but ultimately the only way our values change is that uh life knocks us on our ass a little bit and causes us to question everything we understand yeah the whole process of losing an identity mourning that trying to find or create a new sense of self i think is uh one very misunderstood and two really really critical you talk about people breaking away and quote unquote finding themselves in a moment of crisis walk us through that and i'd love to hear if that's what you were doing you're so well traveled yeah 60 plus countries speak three languages was that a part of that redefinition for you were you seeking experience like how do you advise people who are they don't know i don't know if i'm a writer i don't know if i'm a musician i don't know what [ __ ] sandwich i enjoy like yeah yeah you know how do you help people through that process i think there's an exploration phase um because it's it's if you have this identity you have this perception of who you are and then suddenly that's yanked away from you there's kind of just this void there um and so i think there needs to be an exploration to find basically find your [ __ ] sandwich essentially and it takes time it takes patience and i think they're probably the most helpful thing you can do is just be okay with not knowing let's talk about building resilience you said something early that i found really interesting which is that you have a relationship with yourself the way that you have with somebody else yeah which is really fascinating tell me about that like what do you mean by that and and then like the whole notion of i forget the exact word you used but you said i approach this like a buddhist the self is an illusion i don't think you said that but it was like it made me feel that way yes yes yes i i said it's an arbitrary construct which yeah illusion um i think uh so our relationship with ourselves like essentially what self-esteem is or self-worth is basically let me back up for a second the feeling brain so the thinking brain thinks in terms of like logic cause and effect correlations things like that the feeling brain thinks in terms of importance um it thinks in terms of values so some things are very valuable and worthy of our of being pursued and other things are very very not valuable and they're they should be avoided and the feeling brain kind of designates you know almost a value score for everything every experience every potential experience that we we can consider including ourselves so our idea of what our self is is just another idea the same way um you know being living in new york is an idea and i there is a certain value i place on that and that that idea has logical connections to all sorts of things that who i am as mark manson is simply a constructed idea in my mind and as a constructed idea my feeling brain has either positive or negative valuations and feelings for for mark manson when people have a low valuation of themselves when they have when their feeling brain thinks that their identity is not valuable and and have negative emotions about it uh we call that low self-esteem and when our the idea of our self ha our feeling brain has a high valuation of it and has positive feelings for it we call that high self-esteem and so a lot of like therapeutic work for many decades was kind of almost obsessed of like just trying to get people people's this relationship between your feeling brain and your conception of your identity to get it to get the needle to move from negative to positive because there are all sorts of you know positive repercussions of that um but ultimately that your your concept of yourself is built out of um the narratives that we create out of our experience so all of the experiences that i've had or all the experiences that you have you know your idea of tom is just this vast collection of uh narratives that you've constructed around your own experiences and it's layer on top of layer on top of layer on top of layer and your feeling brain has a certain you know valence for those experiences um and so if you want to change how you feel about yourself you have to start peeling back those layers of narrative and start getting down into the deepest earliest ones because those are often the most impactful and influential well you can't leave us with just that so how do we begin peeling back those layers man like i'm so with you on that yeah and the way that people construct their sense of self and beliefs and values and it's like this just crazy rat's nest of unidentified unexplained beliefs feelings reactions long-held wounds that have never been dealt with from your childhood i mean it's but but that act of peeling that stuff back i think is also an act of rewriting yes so it's like ah i've identified this narrative now what narrative do i change it to yeah and so going back to your your driving analogy you've got this thinking brain whose job is to basically rewrite the map of a past experience yeah how do you help people take control of that or do you have thoughts around how they can take control of that are there like i i would say i have a very strong thesis about whatever you rewrite like the guiding principle should not be a guiding principle of objective truth because i think people are atrocious at figuring out what is actually objectively true sure so if you could that would be amazing but since you can't focus entirely on what's empowering so using your language what moves the needle to something positive yeah do you have a guiding principle that you tell people to utilize when thinking about that rewriting process i think so everybody's a little bit different and this is how i see like therapy meditation journaling like a lot of these therapeutic practices like i see them they're all different versions of what you just said it's like peeling that layer back looking at it being like huh maybe that's not true what what if this idea was true instead like trying on new uh narratives and in stories that define ourselves um so everybody you know everybody kind of has their own you know practice that will resonate with them more um but it's in terms of like how to actually go about it i think the first step is to just decide that you don't actually know who you are again it's the buddhist thing it's like the self's an illusion it's an arbitrary construct that you've spun up uh over the course of your life and so it's just this thing it's just this idea it's a subjective uh it's a subjective idea and it can be anything you want now you don't that doesn't mean you necessarily like wanna become delusional and decide that you're spider-man and and you're going to be president of ukraine like it's you want to be you want to be tethered to reality but also understand that you don't like you said you never know for certain who you actually are you don't actually know what's true you don't know if you're a good person or a bad person you don't know if you're a musician or an author i could label my label myself anything so i think when we we start to realize that at how uh kind of lose that certainty about who we are what we think we know about ourselves that kind of like it starts to loosen the glue of that that ball that ball of yarn of stories that we've told ourselves and once that glue is loosened you can more easily pull pull threads out and start to see like oh well yeah that's that's definitely not you know that's probably not the most helpful narrative that i could create for myself so i guess i guess that would be the second step you know first step lose the certainty second step is to actually like pull on some of these threads and then um and then question you know what if that wasn't true like what if what if music school didn't kick my ass what if i just what if i just didn't try hard enough you know like could be true what would that mean about me it's useful to sit down and think think through those things because it's by doing that enough that you you start to stumble upon epiphanies and and like big realizations about what you've been telling yourself your whole life we have to understand that our identities are are not logically constructed they are emotionally constructed and they are emotionally constructed based on our feelings and they are they have an inertia to them to bring it back to the newton's laws our identities have an inertia to them that uh is extremely difficult to stop or reverse um and you you definitely can't do it just through logical arguments or you know punishing somebody so how the hell do we put ourselves in those difficult situations like how do we seek them out i think uh i think it's it's it's just a healthy habit to develop the desire to challenge yourself in every sense physically mentally emotionally um you know one thing i definitely started trying to do especially recently given like the political climate that's been going on is i seek out articles and news sources that i disagree with um because i i see the the bubbles that everybody's in and the tribal lines that everybody's drawing and i am i'm horrified by it but i also want to try my best to not succumb to that myself and so um yeah i read sources i read books of things i disagree with and and it's and it changes me it it really does it it softens me um sometimes i'll finish the book and i'm like well i still don't agree with them but damn i respect them now like that's a smart person and so that that's one way i do it intellectually but i think it's you know that carries over into all areas of life i mean it's as simple as you know if you go to the gym it's like challenge yourself to do something new take a class that you know like my wife just at the age of 37 decided she want to learn how to swim and she's like mortified of it you know but i'm like hell yeah go do it you know like that's because it's not just about swimming it's it's about just developing that consistent habit of like stepping into your discomfort i love that who was who was it that you you quoted them they said either to their daughter or niece it was a famous writer i think um that the whole idea of getting better at life is about surrounding yourself with people that disagree with you or don't think like you think yeah i'm putting you on the spot here but i thought that was such an interesting idea about getting yourself around disconfirmation getting yourself around people that shake you out of your cognitive biases i think that's really powerful man i really think in this book you're on to some of the most fundamental and important things that a human being can do to change who they are i think it is super powerful and way extraordinary i have no doubt that the author hat author identity is a good identity for you um where can people find you where can they get the book so website is markmanson.net there's hundreds of articles there encourage people to check it out book is available everywhere every story you can imagine it should be there so go check it out um and i will be doing a speaking tour across u.s canada and hopefully australia and uk um so you can learn about that go to either go to my facebook page which is facebook slash markmansonnet or markmanson.net book dash tour nice all right what's the impact that you want to have on the world i want to expand and i basically i just want to challenge people i want to challenge people to find new perspectives and to keep i think if you look at what human progress is it's ultimately rooted in the the search and the discovery and the testing of new perspectives and taking the same experience and rewriting the meaning around it and so um i see my work very much as training brains to do that better i like that a lot my man thank you so much for coming on the show that was absolutely extraordinary guys if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care brother that was amazing thank you good [ __ ] what's up impactivists if you want to acquire new skills or improve the ones you already have then you're going to love this as you know a huge part of my life is about acquiring skills that have utility and exist in service of something greater than myself and that is why i highly recommend skillshare skillshare is an online learning community with over 25 000 classes across more skills than you can imagine at impact theory we've used skillshare for things like project management marketing analytics and even for our comic book and today skillshare is giving the first 500 people who click on the link in the description two free months to their entire library of courses that's 60 days access to literally thousands of courses on whatever topics you choose for no money at all you just have to click on the link in the description below and join the classes that work for you and you will be in very good company as one of seven million people on skillshare and should you decide to stick around beyond your free trial an annual subscription to skillshare is less than 10 dollars a month that's nothing for a skill that could very well change your life so go ahead and click on the link in the description below to start acquiring those skills today and until next time my friends be legendary take care i want to influence them i want to get inside your skin inside your brain and alter how you look at the world i think this change in your perspective and how you look and socialize and deal with people will radically alter so many aspects in your life

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 1,325,123

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Mark Manson, Mark Manson Tom Bilyeu, Mark Manson Impact Theory, The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck

Id: 5m81Qsw0gLw

Length: 46min 35sec (2795 seconds)

Published: Tue May 14 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/melbdemons20]

Mark Manson - author of The subtle Art of not Giving a F* has a (I feel) fresh take on life/dealing with self doubt, anxious situations/ he is good at being able to analyse why we might feel a particular way, what it means, and breaks down why struggle is necessary and not only will anyone not have a stress free/anxiety free life - but why a life free of trouble is a life that is an empty one.

[u/FreshlyBakedMan]

I'm a big fan of his books and blog.
Great video